Common Topics

Recent Articles

Adobe has resuscitated Flash Player for 64-bit Linux, drawing cheers from penguins across the planet.

On Wednesday, the company released a beta version of Flash Player 11 for the desktop, and this included a 64-bit Linux beta. In June of last year, Adobe murdered an experimental version of Flash 10.1 for 64-bit Linux, but it promised the penguin population it would revive the 64-bit Linux player in a future Flash release.

In September, a 64-bit Linux "preview" arrived, and now Adobe has made good on its promise.

Not that penguins are completely happy with the company. Last month, Adobe dumped the Linux incarnation of AIR – its Flash-based runtime – into the hands of OEMs, saying its attempts to promote the runtime on Linux were far from successful.

The company released the Flash Player 11 beta alongside a beta version of AIR 3. Flash 11 includes "Stage3D" APIs for hardware-accelerated 3D and 2D graphics rendering, H.264 encoding for videos pulled from a computer's camera, support for native JSON, asynchronous bitmap decoding, and G.711 audio compression, among other goodies.

You can download the beta player here, and you can submit bugs here. ®